Please be aware that the Date First Licensed data that is provided to agents, carriers and vendors by the Registry of Motor Vehicles’ new ATLAS system may differ from the Date First Licensed data that was previously provided in the ALARS system.
- The RMV ATLAS system no longer provides Date First Licensed (DFL) data before the late 1980s or early 1990s, depending on the driver and when their license was initiated or renewed.
- This impacts all rating systems – WinRater/SinglePoint and carrier websites – and thus you should always confirm the DFL with your customer during the interview and quoting process. This is especially important for drivers who were born before 1975.
- If you do a RMV Lookup in WinRater/SinglePoint while quoting an Auto policy, WinRater/SinglePoint will retrieve and prefill the DFL field with the data ATLAS provides. You may overwrite this information, but you should confirm with your carrier(s) how they will handle this. Carriers may choose to accept your modified date or they may use the ATLAS date.
The reason the old ALARS data had a different DFL was because there was a free-form field in the RMV screens that could be populated by an RMV clerk for various reasons. If there was a date in this free-form field, rating systems would use that data for DFL. However, during the transition from ALARS to ATLAS, the data was deemed unreliable and was excluded from the new ATLAS system.
We’ve been informed that some Carriers have suggested that agents can go to the ATLAS web portal and get a different DFL for a license number. This is not correct, according to the RMV. Below are some bullet points directly from the RMV outlining the history, suggested methods of DFL retrieval, and what ATLAS is doing.
- The old ALARS field of Date First Licensed was determined to be unreliable and a decision was made to NOT convert that piece of data when transitioning from ALARS to ATLAS.
- The best option that the RMV has is to determine the Date First Licensed based on the array of driver history available in ATLAS.
- This driver license history (which was converted from ALARS) only goes back to when ALARS was implemented (late 1980s).
- For the ATLAS Web services, the RMV does not calculate a Date First Licensed but provides the entire array of driver license history that exists within ATLAS.
We wanted to bring this matter to your attention so you would understand how the ATLAS system is handling DFL for all users including carriers, agents, and vendors. We also want to strongly encourage you to always confirm the DFL when rating in WinRater/SinglePoint or your carrier website.
Thanks
– The Staff at Boston Software
